Being the touchstone for cloud computing, online retailing giant Amazon wants to brag about its compute, storage, and other cloud services that are sold under the Amazon Web Services brand. For whatever reason – probably to obscure the costs and possibly the profits of the AWS subsidiary – Amazon has not broken out the business …

what decade are you in?

Please El Reg do us all a favour and stop using pictures of women's bodies alongside your stories. It is degrading to women and insulting to us your audience who are implicated through association. Thanks.

speculate on AWS margins?

I was looking at AWS prices recently, and even comparing to retail prices for servers, space, power, networking, I don't see how AWS could run at less than 20x markup. that's pretty amazing, even compared to, oh, say Apple. could it be that AWS gives incredibly steep discounts to large customers? or could they have some kind of exorbitant hidden costs?

AWS costs between $250 and $700 per year per ECU; purchasing your own servers, running them for 3 years, and throwing them away will cost you somewhere around $50/ECU-year. if you get hardware at wholesale and build/operate your own datacenters, the cost is probably close to half that.